Saturday, June 30, 2012

of my throat choke me under the Granada light. I hear lamenting in the stones, the soil mutilated by a ditch. Music heard in the harvest is music unheard. How can it be written, the fragility of a song? Be palpable here and all

is lost. Be equivocal and all is meaningless. Do the Falangists always win? Why not? Occurrences I know nothing of: to smell olives on a tree that grew faster than my limbs, to savor oranges and water, "to sleep the dream of apples." I listen, but I do not hear, I wake, sequestered among moldy bricks and the black tar,

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

of my horse, the curvature of infinity, to where are we traveling, brooding legless on the desert, nothing but misery and a God willing this and a God willing that, as if the sleek steel of a weapon that goes poot poot is in the hands of a God willing this and a God willing that, and one doomed to die on a wagon pulled by a starved mare, the real deity we need words from, ascensions, rebirths, the waterless shuffling between sand dunes, the human contagion, a vegetableless garden the worms have eaten throughlong after death chants have fouled up the air under the blunt emptiness of the sun.

2SACRIFICEDI squirted through the rooms like a mongoose, squattedfoggily in a corner as the plaster vibrated, my legs cramped monkey version, reduced to less than a weasel, a sheep having its barn crush him before he could be ritually butchered, cowering, hunkering, the streetsvibrating as if a thousand elephants were rumbling down the boulevard ignoring the red lights and a biblical apocalypse were being recorded by cameras. What did a life matter? One teen with a squint, one me, inarticulate as a pebble and as useless, no contract, no agent, no oil, no lungs or a liver, and a heart, beating rapidly, mercilessly, a wretched vase not shattering like a window but flesh torn from my body like fat from a slaughtered pig.

3MOSCAS EN LA MIERDA

Those sons of whores, estos hijos de puta,I calibrate my humanity, not for tyrants, not for anybody, in this erosion called earth, where, like Vallejo, I have only my death to express my life. I live punctually, laden with dust- bugs elbowing under my bed like large roaches, staying covert beneath springs, waiting for what, because there is no waiting, only repudiation and capture. I step forward one day, brush myself off, and say, "Shoot me, if you must, you shoot yourself."No, it is not time to die, it is never time to die, it is time to materialize, to mate, though the air smashes the walls and slits throats.

About Me

Writer, poet, ex-editor, loner, disident, ex-theaterist (M.A. in Theatre), ex-college adjunct instructor, father, New Yorker (born and raised in Brooklyn), lives now in duller-than-tofu NJ. My poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Stand (U.K.—6 poems), College English (4 poems), The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner (2), The Minnesota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Confrontation, Poetry East, The Harvard Advocate (with typo rendering poem a vegetable), Permafrost, Journal of New Jersey Poets, New Collage, Perspective, Ironwood, Grasslimb, South Florida POetry Journal, and in the anthology For a Living—The Poetry of Work (University of Illinois Press). Blogs: stanmarcus.blogspot.com (satirical microessays on everyday confusion), stanmarcus2.blogspot.com (serious poetry), and, blog on a trip I took to China in the 1976. Another blog, called Stan Marcus: Chronicles, deals with (in prose) . . . whatever is on my mind. It's at stanmarcus4.blogspot.com.